Author: treasureshieldsredmond

#StrikeForBlackLives: A Nationwide Job Walk-Off By Black Labor

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  “Hamilton” isn’t the first play written by a writer of color that casts black and brown Americans in the roles of white Americans. 50 years earlier, Douglas Turner Ward wrote “A Day of Absence.” The play, with a role made famous by Ossie Davis, features a black cast playing white people in whit...

From the South Bronx to Southeast Europe

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Today was the final day of the international debate education association (IDEA) program in Macedonia. The two tracks– visual art (graffiti)/comics and hip-hop/poetry – were responsible for presenting their final projects. Prior to DJ Goce’s arrival, I had taken the students through a series of...

Good Beats and Good Eats

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Today we went “crate digging.”  The students in me and Dj Goce’s group all piled into taxis and went to the town center. There was an open air market where used books and used vinyl was being sold. This process has been really pleasurable and improvisational. The students then went on pick sampl...

Your Blues is Like Mine

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I have been collaborating with a Macedonian hiphop Dj and producer named Goce (pronounced GO SEE AH). He began to talk about why hip hop was resonant with him and Macedonian people. He sees hip hop as a dissident art, as he came into consciousness of it in 1989 when socially conscious groups like...

The Global Reach of Blackness

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Today I presented about Fannie Lou Hamer. This is a presentation I’ve done many times now, but because of the audience it was quite different. Because the audience was European and specifically people from the Balkan Peninsula, I stopped much more frequently to explain terms. I spent time on “sha...

“Friend is Worth More than a Dollar”

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Today I rose super thankful for not having to sleep in the airport, and then slog through an eight hour flight, a two hour flight, and then a two and half hour drive . . . unwashed.   My grandmother used to say, “A friend is worth more than a dollar.”  Her reasoning being, if […]...

The Number One Reason the Orlando Shooter was not a “Deranged Loner, and Why We’re More Like Him Than Not

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        Almost as soon as the Orlando shooter was identified, he began to be described as a “loner.” This description is often used to describe the personality of mass shooters. If we look back at the headlines surrounding many of the men who perpetrate mass shootings, the descriptor, “lone...